


where the heart is

by mcmeekin



Series: let me go home [2]
Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Time Force
Genre: Gen, so much friendship i love it, why aren't there three million fics about wes and katie's friendship it's so imporant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2370170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcmeekin/pseuds/mcmeekin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She never hated Time Force, not once, until Wes taught her how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the heart is

She can remember a time when she wanted nothing more than to be a Time Force officer.

She trained for years on her own time before joining the academy. She excelled in all her classes and shot up the ranks. She was excited about every bust, every stakeout, every criminal she put away. She adored it. Of course, not everything was exciting. There were a few boring days filled with reports to file, solo missions to go on, courts to attend, and so on. She hated how boring it could get when no action was happening, but she never hated Time Force, not once, until Wes taught her how.

She never notices how suffocating the rules are until Wes encourages her to break them. She and Trip are the easiest to coerce, with Jen and Lucas being too high and mighty in the beginning to even _think_ of waking up at a time that was not the regulated 6:00 A.M. How dare she and Trip even _consider_ eating junk food for breakfast, or cutting training a little short to watch a movie, or going to bed a little later than they should. Of course, eventually Lucas caves and joins in, and, to the shock of her teammates, as time goes on so does Jen. Wes considers it a personal victory every time Jen sleeps even a minute later than she should. He buys a cake on the day she sleeps until 6:12. But at Time Force, sleeping until 6:01 is punishable by forty laps around the compound. And Katie _hates_ it. After Wes, she practically chafes under rules that seemed perfectly reasonable to her a year ago.

She never notices how cruel Time Force is until Wes gives her reason to. They avoid the memory erase _almost_ without incident the second time around. It just takes the combined efforts of Circuit and Alex to override the orders. It isn't until a week later that word gets to their team that Circuit has been decommissioned and that Alex resigned. When Jen hears, she goes to argue with the Council. She accepts desk duty for a year and her security clearance being revoked in order to get Circuit back up and running, but there’s nothing to be done about Alex. Lucas becomes team leader for the year, a title which he rejects with vehemence. (He makes a point of asking Jen what he is allowed to do and only accepting orders after she’s nodded in approval in front of officials. It infuriates them. Katie’s glad.) Time Force starts testing blood to make sure no mutants fell through the cracks. She wonders if they remember the 2025 B-Squad SPD rangers, the ranger team made up entirely of mutants who saved the world because of who they were. She leaves their file up on a plasma screen in a popular common room, just to see what will happen. The next day she returns to find the file erased.

She never notices how spoiled people in her time (especially Time Force) are until Wes shows her how simple life can be. In 2001, she has to wash clothes (with _water_ ), wash dishes, make food, buy food, buy _everything_ , write with paper, manually turn off the lights, manually drive, cut her hair, and worry about a million little things that she never even thinks about in her time. And she _misses_ it when she gets back to her time. She misses having competitions with Lucas to see who can do their chores for the day the fastest, misses trying to sing louder than both the machine and Wes while vacuuming, misses watching cookies bake, misses chocolate, misses _Wes_. Some days she even misses Eric, the bastard.

Mostly she misses the family they were when they were there. While in 2001, she missed her own family, and rightfully so, but now that she’s back, she realizes that they don’t understand. They are just as blind as everyone in this timeline. _Time Force knows what’s best for us, Katie. Katie, you shouldn't question the authority. What’s gotten into you? Does this change in behavior have anything to do with that year you spent overseas?_ Because, of course, Time Force didn't even tell their families where they really were. No, no that information is _classified_.

 _Classified_. That’s what Time Force has officially called both Wesley Collin’s and Eric Meyers’s files in the Data Bank. The Data Bank is a room which houses all the information that Time Force has access to, but not necessarily the public. Oh sure, it’s _open_ to the public, but only certain security clearances can access certain information. She had thought that that rule was reasonable before Wes. Since she’s a ranger, she has the security clearance to open any file in the room, including classified ones. She thinks that Time Force doesn't believe she’ll do it. They think Jen will, hence the revoking of security clearance. They think Trip will; his is limited after a minor rule infraction that he had forgotten existed. They don’t think Lucas will, and they’re right. But they’re wrong about her. She would, but she doesn't. It would show up in the logs that she looked at their files. Instead, she searches for non-classified files, files they can’t get her in trouble for looking at, files she knows that they’ll know she looked at, and it feels like the sort of thing Wes would approve of.

She reads about the Silver Guardians, about how Wes became the co-leader with Eric, about how much good they did for the city, about how their services were free, how they merged with the police department which merged with SPD. That prompts her to read the SPD files from the year of the merger on. She finds out that Wes submitted his morpher for testing, that some of the early suit designs for SPD Power Rangers looked like Time Force. She grins when she thinks of Wes’s reaction to that. She gets the feeling he didn't hand it over as voluntarily as the file suggests. It also states that the Astro Rangers “voluntarily” submitted their powers for experimentation, a feat she finds unbelievable considering what she knows about the Astro Rangers.

She traces the logs of SPD employees until Wes retires. Through both mergers, the Silver Guardian’s function remains basically the same, leaving Eric’s and Wes’s roles the same. She notices a time when Eric left for paternity leave. She laughs for a good minute at the thought of Eric as a parent. She pulls up wedding announcements from Silver Hills in years she thinks he might have gotten married. It occurs to her that he might not have, but she finds the article confirming the marriage before that thought could fester too long. Wes was his best man. She’s happy for Eric, really and truly happy, but she can’t shake the feeling that she should have been there too. By checking SPD personnel records, she finds out that Wes and Eric had the same home phone number until a year before Eric got married. They had lived together. Her heart contracts at the thought of Wes living alone. Eric retires the same year Wes does.

She checks obituaries next, not because she wants to know when they died, but rather because she wants to know how they lived. She finds Mr. Collins’s first and feels her heart swell with pride at how much the community loved him in the end. Eric’s comes next, a long time later. He had two daughters and all sorts of military decoration. It takes her a while to find Wes’s. He was loved by everyone, it says, and loved everyone in return. He never married.

She intakes breath sharply when she sees those words and finds herself shutting the obituaries file. She hugs herself and tries to stop the tears that have already started. She tells herself that she’s being irrational, that it doesn't mean anything. But she can’t get rid of the feeling that it’s their fault that he never married, their fault for bringing Jen into his life, their fault that he probably never got over it. It’s stupid, but the thought sticks. It does make her curious about Alex, though. She pulls up his file and traces his ancestry back to…Wes’s cousin. Typical.

It’s barely been a day since the end of Jen’s probation when Jen’s summoned before the Council. She doesn't come out of the meeting until nighttime, but the entire team waits up for her. The common room attached to their quarters is empty when she comes back in, looking dazed.

“What did they want?” Trip asks immediately, leaping up from the couch. Katie and Lucas follow suit, albeit a little slower.

Her eyes drift up to the corner of the room where the monitoring system is housed before wandering back down to look Lucas in the eye. “Confidential solo mission in an area the Council feels members of our team know best,” she says, her voice even, but her eyes betray her. Katie’s heart leaps.

“You don’t mean—” Lucas begins, but Jen cuts across him.

“You will all be briefed if I ever find myself in need of backup.” Her eyes meet Katie’s, and Katie understands that Jen will do everything in her power to make sure that she needs backup. “I leave tomorrow.”

When Katie hears what the mission actually is, she almost laughs. Three rogue half-mutants in the year 2002 in the city where the active team resides? She checks to make sure it is, in fact, Wild Force, a team more than capable of taking the mut-orgs down themselves. It almost seems like the Council is doing something kind for once, but more than likely it’s just them being overly zealous in their pursuit of perfection.

When she comes out of the time ship and sees Wes standing there with that dumbass smile on his face, it’s like all the pent-up frustration and hurt and anger she’s been holding for the past year just dissipates off her shoulders and none of it matters anymore, none of Time Force’s rules, their perfection, their cruelty, none of it matters because she’s _home_ , she’s home again, and suddenly she’s crushing him, and if she missed him complaining about her super-strength hugs, well, she’s not telling him.

He looks older. He and Eric both look older. It’s maturity, she decides, a state of mind she would never have thought to associate with Wes before. Maybe it was there the last time she saw him, or maybe it’s taken a year of separation for her to see it clearly. He had been forced to take up the leader’s mantle in the past year, and it shows. Every time Katie so much as looks sideways at him, she can’t help but grin.

The night before they have to go back again, they sleep in the rebuilt clock tower. It’s the princess’s idea, suggested softly as the light fades on their picnic. They are always welcome at the Animarium, but maybe they’d like to spend their last night together, she asks in that musical voice of hers. They all agree easily.

Wes takes them to the tower, explains how he had it rebuilt exactly as it had been before, using many of the salvaged materials from its destruction during the last battle. Lucas makes a crack about not adding an elevator, and maybe they all laugh a little too hard.

She resents how easily they all fall asleep, in their own areas like they always do ( _did_ ). Sleep is farther from her than her own timeline. She slips out of bed when lying still becomes unbearable, slips past Jen carefully, and slips outside.

The city looks just like she remembers it. Well, almost. There’s a new skyscraper going up, and she wonders if it’s to replace one lost in a battle.

She is not the only one chasing sleep tonight, she finds. Wes leans against the railing, staring out at the city, tension lining his shoulders.

“I never asked how your dad is,” she says as way of greeting. He jumps slightly but offers her an easy smile when he discovers who she is and slides over a little so she can lean next to him. She does, looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

He shrugs. “Had a rough spell with his health recently, but he’s fine now. How’s yours?”

She smiles, oddly pleased that he remembered her concern for her family. “He still exists, as far as I know.” They chuckle. “But, uh, not quite as understanding as your dad when it comes to my activities last year.” Wes shoots her a quizzical look. “My family… Time Force didn't tell them where we were. Time Force barely told other people in Time Force where we were. And they… don’t understand. It feels like they’re different people, but they’re not the ones who changed.”

They stand in comfortable silence for a long time. She's the one to break it by saying, softly, almost inaudibly, “Wes?"

"Hm?" he replies, looking at her.

She doesn't speak for a while, thinking of how she wants to phrase the question. Finally, she asks, in a whisper the wind almost steals from her, "When did I stop thinking of there as home?”

He doesn't say anything, just puts his hand on top of where hers rests on the balcony railing and squeezes it gently.

They stay that way for an eternity. Eventually, he turns to look at her with a serious expression on his face. “Do you think we could make cookies without waking up everyone else?”

She stares at him for a second before her face splits into a grin. “There’s no way.”

And there’s the Wesley Collins smile she remembers: all the mischief and adventure of a seven year old displayed on a grown man’s face. “Race you to the fridge.”

And maybe, just maybe, if they bury their teammates in enough flour, tomorrow won’t come at all.


End file.
